Top Sober Schools

Party schools not your thing? More focused on finding a career with the most earning potential? See top sober school rankings by graduate salary.[Read More]

College is often associated with raging parties and experimentation with drugs and alcohol, but students who attend the schools on this list say that college is a sober matter. Using The Princeton Review's guide to define sober schools, PayScale's College Salary Report ranked schools where students study more than they party. The Princeton Review bases their rankings off a survey of students, and defines sober schools as colleges where students say that on-campus parties are not very common, and that alcohol and drugs and relatively rare.

Military schools are the sober schools with the highest-earning graduates. The United States Military Academy (USMA) at West Point and the United States Naval Academy (USMA) at Annapolis come in high for both early career salaries and mid-career salaries for grads who go into civilian careers.

Many of the other schools on our list of top-earning sober schools are religious schools. Wheaton College in Illinois, Pepperdine in California, Grove City College in New York and BYU's Idaho Campus all make the list as well.

Public city colleges in New York show up on this list as well. Schools like CUNY City College, CUNY Brooklyn College and CUNY Queens College are made up mostly of commuter students. Having the majority of students not live on campus doesn't encourage a big party scene or a heavy Greek population.